Reply to If your teen had a serious mental heath crisis how did it change your life?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a friend going through this with her DD now.  Is there anything I can do to support my friend?  Is there anything that will lighten her load even a tiny bit or brighten her day somehow?[/quote]

I can say my mom would have said she would have really appreciated someone inviting her to do something “normal” and not bringing up or asking about the child for that one moment in time to give her a break from it all. But on the other hand, she really only confided in two people outside our family so I’m not sure anyone would have known to reach out to her.

I can only speak as the older sibling who watched the wreckage left behind when mental illness stole my younger sibling from us. To the parents dealing with it, my heart goes out to you, but if you have other children, and I know how hard it is to split your focus, try to make sure they aren’t lost while the family addresses the child with the most crucial issues. It has been and continues to be a nightmare for our family. The first incident occurred when my sibling was 13. The latest was just last year when my sibling was 35. I’ve lost count of the hospitalizations at this point, it’s at least 2 dozen, likely more because my mother alternates between trying to hide it from me to dumping every last worry on me. I felt like I lost my entire family in that first moment. It tore my parents apart, in the first few years they easily aged a decade+. Our home became one of violent incidents followed by disappearances followed by rehab, followed by having to locate my sibling in some god forsaken place, followed by police calls, rinse and repeat. My mother never stops worrying. To this day if my sibling does anything remotely suggestive of behaviors that lead to another break, she calls me constantly and rehashes incidents of the last 20+ years. Then there’s my dad, who has buried his head in the sand for the last 20 plus years and refuses to discuss it with my mom unless absolutely essential. And then there’s my sibling. You just don’t know what you’re going to get day to day or week to week. I think I’ve been walking around my sibling on eggshells for the last 23 years. Our family is just so fractured. And it’s really difficult as the child who appeared by all counts to be fine and on the traditional pathway through school and adulthood to always be shoved aside because your sibling had another incident. My parents also didn’t want people to know anything was wrong, so I was strictly forbidden from telling people I was struggling because I’d been left to my own devices with no one to talk to. I think family counseling for my parents and me would have really helped at the time, but that wasn’t happening. I have major anxiety because I am the executor for their estate and the named trustee for the trust set up my sibling so I will never escape being responsible. And in all of it, I fear that there’s something genetically that I could have passed to my own kids that would cause me to have to go through this again as a parent this time. [/quote]
I’m so sorry PP, this sounds just awful. I think the siblings often get neglected no matter how well intended parents are. [/quote]

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